At around 8:30 in the morning on Wednesday, January 11, while much
of Tehran was snarled in its usual rush-hour traffic, a motorcyclist
drew alongside a gray Peugeot and affixed a magnetic bomb to its
exterior. The ensuing blast killed the car's thirty-two-year-old
passenger, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a professor of chemistry and the
deputy director of Iran's premiere uranium enrichment facility. The
assassin disappeared into traffic, and Roshan became the fifth Iranian
nuclear scientist to die in violent or mysterious circumstances since
2007.

The attack was, in a sense, fairly typical of the covert war being
waged against Iran's nuclear program, a campaign that has included
computer sabotage as well as the serial assassination of Iranian
scientists. Even the manner of the killing was routine; Roshan was the
third scientist to die from a magnet bomb slapped onto his car during a
commute. But the timing of the chemist's death--amid a series of
diplomatic events that came fast and furious in January and February,
each further complicating relations with Iran--had the effect of
dramatizing how close this covert war may be to becoming an overt one.

On New Year's Eve, eleven days before the bombing that killed
Roshan, President Barack Obama enacted a new round of sanctions that
essentially blacklisted Iran's central bank by penalizing anyone
who does business with it, a move designed to cripple the Islamic
Republic's ability to sell oil overseas. Iran responded by
threatening to militarily shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow
shipping lane out of the Persian Gulf through which 20 percent of the
world's oil trade passes. On January 8, three days before the
attack on Roshan, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta appeared on Face
the Nation and reinforced America's commitment to keep Iran from
acquiring a nuclear weapon, dust in December, Panetta had emphasized the
damaging consequences that war with Iran would bring, but now he
stressed that Iranian development of a nuclear weapon would cross a
"red line." When the European Union announced its own
sanctions of the Iranian central bank in late January, Iran redoubled
its threat to block shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz. Panetta
called this another "red line" that would provoke a military
response from the U.S. February brought more posturing from Iran, along
with two assassination attempts against Israelis living in New Delhi and
Tbilisi that were widely attributed to Tehran.

All of this has played out against the unhelpful backdrop of
American election-year politics. The Republican presidential candidates,
with the exception of the antiwar libertarian Ron Paul, have seized on
Iran as a possible winning issue and have tried to outdo each other in
sounding bellicose about it. Mitt Romney has repeatedly discussed the
use of military force as one way of fulfilling his promise that, if he
is elected, Iran "will not have a nuclear weapon." In short,
both Democrats and Republicans have so ratcheted up their alarm about
the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon that they are willing to
commit to the extreme step of launching an offensive war--an act of
aggression--to try to stop it.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government, which has led the way in talking
up the danger of an Iranian bomb, represents a significant hazard
outside Washington's control. It was most likely the Israelis, for
instance, who orchestrated the provocatively timed attack on Roshan.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently dialed down the heat somewhat by
saying that an Israeli decision to strike Iran was "far off."
But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, mindful of the U.S. electoral
calendar and the possibility that Barack Obama might pull off a victory
in November, may see a temporary opportunity to precipitate a conflict
in which a preelection U.S. president would feel obliged to join in on
Israel's side.

Yet even without an Israeli decision to start a war, recent U.S.,
Iranian, and Israeli actions already constitute an escalation toward
one. Rising tensions have increased the chance that even a minor
incident, such as a seaborne encounter in the Persian Gulf, could spiral
out of control. And Iran's own covert actions--perhaps including
the recent spate of car bombs targeting Israeli officials in India and
Georgia and last year's bizarre alleged plot to blow up a
restaurant in Washington, D.C., and kill the Saudi ambassador--feed even
more hostility from the U.S. and Israel, escalating further the risk of
open conflict.

Thus we find ourselves at a strange pass. Those in the United
States who genuinely yearn for war are still a neoconservative minority.
But the danger that war might break out--and that the hawks will get
their way--has nonetheless become substantial. The U.S. has just
withdrawn the last troops from one Middle Eastern country where it
fought a highly costly war of choice with a rationale involving weapons
of mass destruction. Now we find ourselves on the precipice of yet
another such war--almost purely because the acceptable range of opinion
on Iran has narrowed and ossified around the "sensible" idea
that all options must be pursued to prevent the country from acquiring
nuclear weapons.

Given the momentousness of such an endeavor and how much prominence
the Iranian nuclear issue has been given, one might think that talk
about exercising the military option would be backed up by extensive
analysis of the threat in question and the different ways of responding
to it. But it isn't. Strip away the bellicosity and political
rhetoric, and what one finds is not rigorous analysis but a mixture of
fear, fanciful speculation, and crude stereotyping. There are indeed
good reasons to oppose Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, and
likewise many steps the United States and the international community
can and should take to try to avoid that eventuality. But an Iran with a
bomb would not be anywhere near as dangerous as most people assume, and
a war to try to stop it from acquiring one would be less successful, and
far more costly, than most people imagine.

What difference would it make to Iran's behavior and influence
if the country had a bomb? Even among those who believe that war with
the Islamic Republic would be a bad idea, this question has been
subjected to precious little careful analysis. The notion that a nuclear
weapon would turn Iran into a significantly more dangerous actor that
would imperil U.S. interests has become conventional wisdom, and it gets
repeated so often by so many diverse commentators that it seldom, if
ever, is questioned. Hardly anyone debating policy on Iran asks exactly
why a nuclear-armed Iran would be so dangerous. What passes for an
answer to that question takes two forms: one simple, and another that
sounds more sophisticated.

The simple argument is that Iranian leaders supposedly don't
think like the rest of us: they are religious fanatics who value
martyrdom more than life, cannot be counted on to act rationally, and
therefore cannot be deterred. On the campaign trail Rick Santorum has
been among the most vocal in propounding this notion, asserting that
Iran is ruled by the "equivalent of al-Qaeda," that its
"theology teaches" that its objective is to "create a
calamity," that it believes "the afterlife is better than this
life," and that its "principal virtue" is martyrdom. Newt
Gingrich speaks in a similar vein about how Iranian leaders are suicidal
jihadists, and says "it's impossible to deter them."

The trouble with this image of Iran is that it does not reflect
actual Iranian behavior. More than three decades of history demonstrate
that the Islamic Republic's rulers, like most rulers elsewhere, are
overwhelmingly concerned with preserving their regime and their
power--in this life, not some future one. They are no more likely to let
theological imperatives lead them into self-destructive behavior than
other leaders whose religious faiths envision an afterlife. Iranian
rulers may have a history of valorizing martyrdom--as they did when
sending young militiamen to their deaths in near-hopeless attacks during
the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s--but they have never given any indication
of wanting to become martyrs themselves. In fact, the Islamic
Republic's conduct beyond its borders has been characterized by
caution. Even the most seemingly ruthless Iranian behavior has been
motivated by specific, immediate concerns of regime survival. The
government assassinated exiled Iranian dissidents in Europe in the 1980s
and '90s, for example, because it saw them as a
counterrevolutionary threat. The assassinations ended when they started
inflicting too much damage on Iran's relations with European
governments. Iran's rulers are constantly balancing a very worldly
set of strategic interests. The principles of deterrence are not invalid
just because the party to be deterred wears a turban and a beard.

If the stereotyped image of Iranian leaders had real basis in fact,
we would see more aggressive and brash Iranian behavior in the Middle
East than we have. Some have pointed to the Iranian willingness to incur
heavy losses in continuing the Iran-Iraq War. But that was a response to
Saddam Hussein's invasion of the Iranian homeland, not some
bellicose venture beyond Iran's borders. And even that war ended
with Ayatollah Khomeini deciding that the "poison" of agreeing
to a cease-fire was better than the alternative. (He even described the
ceasefire as "God's will"--so much for the notion that
the Iranians' God always pushes them toward violence and
martyrdom.)

Throughout history, it has always been worrisome when a
revolutionary regime with ruthless and lethal internal practices moves
to acquire a nuclear weapon. But it is worth remembering that we have
contended with far more troubling examples of this phenomenon than Iran.
Millions died from forced famine and purges in Stalin's Soviet
Union, and tens of millions perished during the Great Leap Forward in
Mao Tse-tung's China. China's development of a nuclear weapon
(it tested its first one in 1964) seemed all the more alarming at the
time because of Mao's openly professed belief that his country
could lose half its population in a nuclear war and still come out
victorious over capitalism. But deterrence with China has endured for
half a century, even during the chaos and fanaticism of Mao's
Cultural Revolution. A few years after China got the bomb, Richard Nixon
built his global strategy around engagement with Beijing.

The more sophisticated-sounding argument about the supposed dangers
of an Iranian nuclear weapon--one heard less from politicians than from
policy-debating intelligentsia--accepts that Iranian leaders are not
suicidal but contends that the mere possession of such a weapon would
make Tehran more aggressive in its region. A dominant feature of this
mode of argument is "worst-casing," as exemplified by a
pro-war article by Matthew Kroenig in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs.
Kroenig's case rests on speculation after speculation about what
mischief Iran "could" commit in the Middle East, with almost
no attention to whether Iran has any reason to do those things, and thus
to whether it ever would be likely to do them.

Kroenig includes among his "coulds" a scary possibility
that also served as a selling point of the Iraq War: the thought of a
regime giving nuclear weapons or materials to a terrorist group. Nothing
is said about why Iran or any other regime ever would have an incentive
to do this. In fact, Tehran would have strong reasons not to do it. Why
would it want to lose control over a commodity that is scarce as well as
dangerous? And how would it achieve deniability regarding its role in
what the group subsequently did with the stuff? No regime in the history
of the nuclear age has ever been known to transfer nuclear material to a
nonstate group. That history includes the Cold War, when the USSR had
both a huge nuclear arsenal and patronage relationships with a long list
of radical and revolutionary clients. As for deniability, Iranian
leaders have only to listen to rhetoric coming out of the United States
to know that their regime would immediately be a suspect in any
terrorist incidents involving a nuclear weapon.

The more sophisticated-sounding argument links Iran with sundry
forms of objectionable behavior, either real or hypothetical, without
explaining what difference the possession of a nuclear weapon would
make. Perhaps the most extensive effort to catalog what a nuclear-armed
Iran might do outside its borders is a monograph published last year by
Ash Jain of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Jain's
inventory of possible Iranian nastiness is comprehensive, ranging from
strong-arming Persian Gulf states to expanding a strategic relationship
with Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. But nowhere is there an explanation
of how Iran's calculations--or anyone else's--would change
with the introduction of a nuclear weapon. The most that Jain can offer
is to assert repeatedly that because Iran would be "shielded by a
nuclear weapons capability," it might do some of these things. We
never get an explanation of how, exactly, such a shield would work.
Instead there is only a vague sense that a nuclear weapon would lead
Iran to feel its oats.

Analysis on this subject need not be so vague. A rich body of
doctrine was developed during the Cold War to outline the strategic
differences that nuclear weapons do and do not make, and what they can
and cannot achieve for those who possess them. Such weapons are most
useful in deterring aggression against one's own country, which is
probably the main reason the Iranian regime is interested in developing
them. They are much less useful in "shielding" aggressive
behavior outside one's borders, except in certain geopolitical
situations in which their use becomes plausible.

The Pakistani-Indian conflict may be such a situation.
Pakistan's nuclear arsenal may have enabled it to engage in riskier
behavior in Kashmir than it otherwise would attempt, because nuclear
weapons help to deter Pakistan's ultimate nightmare: an assault by
the militarily superior India, which could slice Pakistan in two and
perhaps destroy it completely. But if you try to apply that logic to
Iran, no one is playing the role of India. Iran has its own tensions and
rivalries with its neighbors--including Iraq, Saudi Arabia, other states
on the Persian Gulf, and Pakistan. But none of these pose the kind of
existential threat that Pakistan sees coming from India. Moreover, none
of the current disputes between Iran and its neighbors (such as the one
over ownership of some small islands also claimed by the United Arab
Emirates) come close to possessing the nation-defining significance that
the Kashmir conflict poses for both Pakistan and India.

Nuclear weapons matter insofar as there is a credible possibility
that they will be used. This credibility is hard to achieve, however, in
anything short of circumstances that might involve the destruction of
one's nation. In the case of Iran, there would need to be some
specific aggressive or subversive act that Tehran is holding back from
performing now for fear of retaliation--from the Americans, the
Israelis, the Saudis, or someone else. Further, in order for Iran to
neutralize the threat of retaliation, the desired act of mischief would
have to be so important to Tehran that it could credibly threaten to
escalate the matter to the level of nuclear war. Proponents of a war
with Iran have been unable to provide an example of a scenario that
meets these criteria, however. The impact of Iran possessing a bomb is
therefore far less dire than the alarmist conventional wisdom suggests.

To be sure, the world would be a better place without an Iranian
nuclear weapon. An Iranian bomb would be a set-back for the global
nuclear nonproliferation regime, for example, and the arms control
community is legitimately concerned about it. It would also raise the
possibility that other regional states, such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt,
might be more inclined to try to acquire nuclear weapons as well. But
that raises the question of why these states have not already done so,
despite decades of facing both Israel's nuclear force and tensions
with Iran. Ever since John F. Kennedy mused that there might be fifteen
to twenty-five states with nuclear weapons by the 1970s, estimates of
the pace of proliferation--like estimates of the pace of Iran's
nuclear program--have usually been too high.

Furthermore, it's not clear that any of this would cause
substantial and direct damage to U.S. interests. Indeed, the alarmists
offer more inconsistent arguments when discussing the dynamics of a
Middle East in which rivals of Iran acquire their own nuclear weapons.
If, as the alarmists project, nuclear weapons would appreciably increase
Iranian influence in the region, why wouldn't further nuclear
proliferation--which the alarmists also project--negate this effect by
bestowing a comparable benefit on the rivals?

In the absence of further proliferation among Iran's rivals,
there is a chance that Iran would be marginally bolder if it possessed a
nuclear weapon--and that the United States and other countries in the
Middle East would be correspondingly less bold. Perceptions of strength
do matter. But two further observations are important. First, once
concrete confrontations occur, strategic realities trump perceptions.
One of the conjectures in Jain's monograph, for instance, is that
Hezbollah and Hamas might become emboldened if Iran extended a nuclear
umbrella over them. But in the face of Israel's formidable nuclear
superiority, would Iranian leaders really be willing to risk Tehran to
save Gaza? The Iranians could not get anyone to believe such a thing.

Second, one must ultimately ask whether the conjectured
consequences of an Iranian bomb would be worse than a war with Iran. The
conjectures are just that. They are not concrete, not based on nuclear
doctrine or rigorous analysis, and not even likely. They are worst-case
speculations, and not adequate justifications for going to war.

When the debate turns from discussing the consequences that would
flow from Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon to discussing the
consequences of a U.S. military attack on Iran, the mode of argument
used by proponents of an attack changes entirely. Instead of the worst
case, the emphasis is now on the best case. This "best-casing"
often rests on the assumption that military action would take the form
of a confined, surgical use of air power to take out Iran's nuclear
facilities. But the dispersed nature of the target and the U.S.
military's operational requirements (including the suppression of
Iranian air defenses) would make this a major assault. It would be the
start of a war with Iran. As Richard Betts remarks in his recent book
about the American use of military force, anyone who hears talk about a
surgical strike should get a second opinion.

If the kind of worst-casing that war proponents apply to the
implications of a nuclear Iran were applied to this question, the
ramifications would be seen as catastrophic: we would be hearing about a
regional conflagration involving multiple U.S. allies, sucking in U.S.
forces far beyond the initial assault. When the Brookings Institution
ran a war-games simulation a couple of years ago, an Israeli strike on
Iranian nuclear facilities escalated into a region-wide crisis in which
Iranian missiles were raining down on Saudi Arabia as well as Israel,
and Tehran launched a worldwide terrorist campaign against U.S.
interests.

No one knows what the full ramifications of such a war with Iran
would be, and that is the main problem with any proposal to use military
force against the Iranian nuclear program. But the negative consequences
for U.S. interests are likely to be severe. In December, Secretary
Panetta identified some of those consequences when he warned of the
dangers of war: increased domestic support for the Iranian regime;
violent Iranian retaliation against U.S. ships and military bases;
"severe" economic consequences; and, perhaps, escalation that
"could consume the Middle East in a confrontation and a conflict
that we would regret."

Surely, Iran would strike back, in ways and places of its own
choosing. That should not be surprising; it is what Americans would do
if their own homeland were attacked. Proponents of an attack and some
Israeli officials offer a more sanguine prediction of the Iranian
response, and this is where their image of Iran becomes most
inconsistent. According to this optimistic view, the same regime that
cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon because it is recklessly
aggressive and prone to cause regional havoc would suddenly become, once
attacked, a model of calm and caution, easily deterred by the threat of
further attacks. History and human behavior strongly suggest, however,
that any change in Iranian conduct would be exactly the opposite--that
as with the Iran-Iraq War, an attack on the Iranian homeland would be
the one scenario that would motivate Iran to respond zealously.
Iran's specific responses would probably include terrorism through
its own agents as well as proxy groups, other violent reprisals against
U.S. forces in the region, and disruption of the exports of other oil
producers.

An armed attack on Iran would be an immediate political gift to
Iranian hard-liners, who are nourished by confrontation with the West,
and with the United States in particular. Armed attack by a foreign
power traditionally produces a rally-round-the-flag effect that benefits
whatever regime is in power. Last year a spokesperson for the opposition
Green Movement in Iran said the current regime "would really like
for someone" to bomb the nuclear facilities because "this
would then increase nationalism and the regime would gather everyone and
all the political parties around itself." Over the longer term, an
attack would poison relations between the United States and generations
of Iranians. It would become an even more prominent and lasting
grievance than the U.S.-engineered overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad
Mosaddeq in 1953 or the accidental shooting down of an Iranian airliner
over the Persian Gulf in 1988. American war proponents who
optimistically hope that an attack would somehow stir the Iranian
political pot in a way that would undermine the current clerical regime
are likely to be disappointed. Even if political change in Iran
occurred, any new regime would be responsive to a populace that has more
reason than ever to be hostile to the United States.

Regional political consequences would include deepened anger at the
United States for what would be seen as unprovoked killing of
Muslims--with everything such anger entails in terms of stimulating more
extremist violence against Americans. The emotional gap between Persians
and Arabs would lessen, as would the isolation of Iran from other states
in the region. Contrary to a common misconception, the Persian Gulf
Arabs do not want a U.S. war with Iran, notwithstanding their own
concerns about their neighbor to the north. The misconception stems
mainly from misinterpretation of a Saudi comment in a leaked cable about
"cutting off the head of the snake." Saudi and other Gulf Arab
officials have repeatedly indicated that while they look to U.S.
leadership in containing Iranian influence, they do not favor an armed
attack. The former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to the United
States, Prince Turki Al Faisal, recently stated, "It is very clear
that a military strike against Iran will be catastrophic in its
consequences, not just on us but the world in general."

Then there are the economic consequences that would stem from a
U.S.-Iranian war, which are incalculable but likely to be immense. Given
how oil markets and shipping insurance work, the impact on oil prices of
any armed conflict in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf would be out of
proportion to the amount of oil shipments directly interdicted, even if
the U.S. Navy largely succeeded in keeping the Strait of Hormuz open.
And given the current fragility of Western economies, the full economic
cost of a war would likewise be out of proportion to the direct effect
on energy prices, a sudden rise in which might push the U.S. economy
back into recession.

In return for all of these harmful effects, an attack on Iran would
not even achieve the objective of ensuring a nuclear-weapons-free Iran.
Only a ground invasion and occupation could hope to accomplish that, and
not even the most fervent anti-Iranian hawks are talking about that kind
of enormous undertaking. Panetta's estimate that an aerial assault
would set back the Iranian nuclear program by only one or two years is
in line with many other assessments. Meanwhile, an attack would provide
the strongest possible incentive for Iran to move forward rapidly in
developing a nuclear weapon, in the hope of achieving a deterrent to
future attacks sooner rather than later. That is how Iraq reacted when
Israel bombed its nuclear reactor in 1981. Any prospect of keeping the
bomb out of Iranian hands would require still more attacks a couple of
years hence. This would mean implementing the Israeli concept of
periodically "mowing the lawn"--a prescription for unending
U.S. involvement in warfare in the Middle East.

"There's only one thing worse than militaryaction against
Iran," Senator John McCain has said, and that is a nuclear-armed
Iran." But any careful look at the balance sheet on this issue
yields the opposite conclusion. Military action against Iran would have
consequences far worse than a nuclear-armed Iran.

War or a world with an Iranian bomb are not the only alternatives.
The judgment of the U.S. intelligence community, as voiced publicly by
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, is that Iran is
retaining the option to build nudear weapons but has not yet decided to
do so. Much diplomatic ground has yet to be explored in searching for a
formula that would permit Iran to have a peaceful nuclear program with
enough inspections and other safeguards to assuage Western concerns
about diversion of nuclear material to military use. As Trita Parsi
reports in a recent book, the Obama administration's brief fling at
diplomacy in 2009 was, in the words of a senior State Department
official, "a gamble on a single roll of the dice." Now the
administration, having seen how stridency toward Iran has threatened to
get out of hand, seems willing to try diplomacy again in talks with Iran
that will also include Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China.

The sanctions on Iran have probably contributed to Tehran's
willingness to negotiate as well. Unless carefully wedded to diplomacy,
however, sanctions risk being a counterproductive demonstration of
Western hostility. Besides being serious about searching for a mutually
acceptable formula of inspections and procedures that would safeguard
against Iranian use of nuclear material for military purposes (and which
may need to permit some Iranian enrichment of uranium), Western
negotiators need to persuade the Iranians that concessions on their part
will lead to the lifting of sanctions. This may be hard to do, partly
because the legislation that imposes U.S. sanctions on Iran mentions
human rights and other issues besides the nuclear program, and partly
because many U.S. hawks openly regard sanctions only as a tool to
promote regime change or as a necessary step toward being able to say
that "diplomacy and sanctions have failed," and thus launching
a war is the only option left. The challenge for the Obama
administration is to persuade Tehran that this attitude does not reflect
official policy.

Why would anyone, weighing all the costs and risks on each side of
this issue, even consider starting a war with Iran The short answer is
that neocon habits die hard. It might seem that the recent experience of
the Iraq War should have entirely discredited such proclivities, or at
least dampened policymakers' inclination to listen to those who
have them. But the war in Iraq may have instead inured the American
public to the extreme measure of an offensive war, at least when it
involves weapons of mass destruction and loathsome Middle Eastern
regimes.

The Iranian government has provided good reason for Americans to
loathe it, from its harsh suppression of the Green Movement to the
anti-Semitic rants and other outrageous statements of President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately the belligerent rhetoric in Iran feeds
belligerent rhetoric in the United States and vice versa, in a process
that yields beliefs on each side that go beyond the reality on the other
side. The demonization of Iran in American discourse has gone on for so
long that even unsupported common wisdom is taken for granted. The
excesses of the Republican primary campaign have contributed to the
pattern. Michele Bachmann, for example, may be out of the race, but when
she stated that the Iranian president "has said that if he has a
nuclear weapon he will use it to wipe Israel off the face of the
Earth," it was the sort of untruth that has tended to stick in the
current climate (never mind that Iran claims it doesn't even want
nuclear weapons).

As for Israel, it is impossible to ignore how much, in American
politics, the Iran issue is an Israel issue. The Netanyahu
government's own repeated invocation of an Iranian nuclear threat
has several roots, including the desire to preserve Israel's
regional nuclear weapons monopoly, the usefulness of having Iran stand
in as the region's "real problem" to divert attention
from the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and simple emotion and
fear. What American politicians don't seem to understand but any
reader of Haaretz would know is that many leading Israelis, whose
experience demonstrates both their deep commitment to Israel's
security and their expertise in pronouncing on it, see the issue
differently. Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan described the idea of an
Israeli air strike on Iranian nudear facilities as "the stupidest
thing I have ever heard." Another former Mossad head, Efraim
Halevy, and the current director of the service, Tamir Pardo, have both
recently denied that an Iranian nudear weapon would be an existential
threat to Israel. Even Defense Minister Barak, in an interview answer
from which he later tried to backtrack, acknowledged that any Iranian
interest in a nuclear weapon was "not just about Israel" but
an understandable interest given the other countries that are already in
the nuclear club.

If Iran acquired the bomb, Israel would retain overwhelming
military superiority, with its own nuclear weapons--which international
think tanks estimate to number at least 100 and possibly
200--conventional forces, and delivery systems that would continue to
outclass by far anything Iran will have. That is part of the reason why
an Iranian nuclear weapon would not be an existential threat to Israel
and would not give Iran a license to become more of a regional
troublemaker. But a war with Iran, begun by either Israel or the United
States, would push Israel farther into the hole of perpetual conflict
and regional isolation. Self-declared American friends of Israel are
doing it no favor by talking up such a war.

Paul R. Pillar teaches in the Security Studies Program at
Georgetown University and was the national intelligence officer for the
Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.

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